Come In and Cover Me (31 page)

But the girl had not brought them with her. She turned toward Ren, and her face held nothing, not even fatigue. She had left them behind, the bowls and the bodies. She left the turquoise necklace on the little girl. She left the flowers over the faces of her children and her husband. She left the graves of her mother and father. She left the ledges of sandstone and the yucca that seemed to grow everywhere. She took nothing but what she could carry.

Ren lost sight of the two women for a moment; she squinted and wondered if she had seen shadows or cholla or something else inanimate and manufactured a vision out of it. Maybe she was so desperate to have her questions answered that she was hallucinating her ghosts now. But no, if she had imagined the women, she would have imagined them loaded down with bulging sacks of Lynay's bowls. And she would have imagined them strong and contented, not muddy and defeated.

She spotted them. Not too far away. She adjusted her angle slightly so that her route took her just down the hill from Non and Lynay, who had not acknowledged her. She could have jogged and caught up with them in five or six steps. Instead she kept a slight distance and fell into step behind them. Lynay obscured the view of Non, but Ren could stare straight at Lynay's wide shoulders and thin waist and absorb details that she had missed when she'd been distracted by the girl's large eyes and quick-moving hands. Now she could see the line of Lynay's spine visible under her thin brown shawl woven with strands of red. She wore one shell bracelet, as white and smooth as Non's two bracelets. She was favoring her right foot. Ren noticed how Lynay followed Non's path exactly. Every loop around a cactus, every step over a boulder. If Non stepped on the left side of a dead branch, Lynay did not step on the middle or the right. She put her foot where Non's had stepped. And it was a good thing, Ren thought, because the girl seemed past thought. Lynay moved mindlessly. She stumbled over a rock, jerked forward, then righted herself, her motions as loose as a puppet's.

Gradually, Ren closed the distance between herself and Lynay. She tried to place her feet where Lynay's had been. She noticed the difference in the girl's pace and Non's sure feet. Non did not hesitate, did not check the angle of the sun or look for signs along the trail. She seemed to know where she was going. Maybe she had been wrong, Ren thought. Maybe the women had not come to warn her or threaten her. Maybe they were retracing their own paths, over and over, and she was only observing.

Non ascended a slab of rock in three steps—wide step to the left, smaller one to the right, pushing off on the last left step to get to even ground. She stopped, turned—not looking at Ren—and held out her hand to Lynay. Lynay followed, left, right, left, and briefly squeezed Non's hand when she reached the top of the slab. Non touched the younger woman's chin with her thumb and forefinger, narrowing her eyes as she read Lynay's face, surely catching the exhaustion and the soreness and deeper things. They held hands for two more steps, three more steps, Ren counted, before Lynay let her hand drop to her side again. Non reached back once more and ran a hand over Lynay's hair.

Lynay's feet landed like falling things, with a surprising impact on each step. She had a deep scrape down her calf muscle, the edges of skin swollen around it. Dried blood dotted her brown leggings. As Ren looked closer, she could see other signs of sharp edges. The layer of dirt had smoothed over other cuts, but touches of red-brown streaked the mud on her legs. The path had left its mark on her skin.

“Lynay,” Ren said. Then louder: “Lynay.”

The girl paused at the sound of her name, just a small second of her foot hovering before it landed on the dirt. She did not turn around.

Why did they make it so hard? Ren wondered, still plodding through the grass. These dead women interrupted her work and plopped themselves down in the middle of her site; they made themselves at home in her living room; they lounged on her bed. They inserted themselves into her life, and then they did their best to ignore her. Ghosts were frustrating, moody creatures. They exhausted her.

“Lynay,” Ren said again, soft as toes on gravel, knowing she already had the girl's attention. She did not want to draw Non's attention. Non might make another proclamation, another terrible decree.

Now Lynay turned her head, only a twist in Ren's direction.

Ren had to ask, had to hope that she had misunderstood all the clues. “What about the bowls? Your work?” she said.

Lynay answered Ren as if she were a very young or very stupid child. “Some things I did not want to carry.”

Ren kept looking at the dried blood on the dirty skin. Lynay's bowls did not reflect this canyon, or an entire people, or a merging community. Lynay had been painting with traces of the north back when she was at Crow Creek, when no other potters had shown any sense of the world ruled by Chaco. But Non had brought the other world to Lynay. And Non had brought the girl to this canyon. She had shaped the routes Lynay would take. While Ren had thought she was tracking the intersection of civilizations caught in the clay, she was following one girl and one woman, and they had let her catch them.

Ren knew the answer to the next question before she asked it.

“Why did you come here?”

Lynay did not slow down. She looked straight ahead at Non. “She is all I have left. She holds everything. Little Owl and my children and my mother and myself—they are all alive in her head.”

Ren stopped moving. She let the women draw away from her: Lynay never looked back. She stumbled again, but Ren felt confident if the girl fell, she would fall forward. And surely Non would catch her.

“Ren!” Silas's voice carried up the slope. She couldn't see him.

“Ren!” he called again.

“Coming,” she called back.

She leaned down and let go of the box in her arms, coming back to the present. Her feet hurt. Her biceps were burning from holding the same position, even though the clay wasn't that heavy. When she looked behind her, she could not see Lynay and Non, either. She did not want to follow them, anyway. She wanted to get off this mountain. She wanted to laugh at Ed's jokes and make fun of Paul for drinking beer and feel Silas's thigh next to hers. The sun would disappear soon—she could already see the pale parenthesis of the moon shining.

She grabbed her box and started downhill. She looked down into the canyon, at the steep slide of green and brown, and thought of falling, of how easy it would be to roll pell-mell over the rocks and ledges, in and out of the arroyos, to gain speed until she hit the bottom.

That night, while she was splashing water on her face at the bathroom sink, she saw Scott in the mirror.

“You're back,” she said.

He nodded.

She turned to face him, resting the backs of her thighs against the counter. Until weeks ago, maybe days ago, she would have sworn Scott would never leave her. He had died, and even that had not forced him away. But she had spent the last few weeks without him, and she had begun to question his permanence.

“I thought maybe you left,” she said, a little resentfully.

“You keep bringing me back,” he said.

His voice sounded just as it always had. She swallowed. His words seemed to have dried up any words of her own.

“You haven't talked to me since I was thirteen years old,” she said, finally. “That summer. In the kitchen—do you remember? I was trying to make popcorn with powdered sugar on top like Mom used to do.”

“I remember.”

She was reeling from the sound of his voice. “So why are you talking to me now?”

“Because I shouldn't see you anymore.”

The bathroom counter was cold and hard under her hands. She could feel a slippery patch where water had dripped from her face. She tightened her grip. “You're the one haunting me.”

“No,” he said. “I'm not.”

“You are a ghost,” she said, slowly, precisely.

She thought of him, fading over the years. He had seemed completely concrete that first day he appeared on the edge of her bed. She had seen him and heard him and felt him, his shoulders as bony as ever under her hands. She had felt his breath on her forehead. His T-shirt had felt like it had been washed a hundred times. The sheets had been bunched up under his legs. And then for some reason, in the days and weeks after that, she couldn't touch him anymore. By the time a year had passed, he had stopped speaking. She saw him less, and even when she saw him, he didn't stay for long. He was often no more than hum, a song. He had hardly any substance at all. She had told herself that this was the way of ghosts, because, after all, he was the only ghost she knew. She did not want to question it. He was a gift—that he was with her at all was the best gift of her life. That he could stay with her and nothing ever changed. No matter how close he had seemed to evaporating altogether, he always came back.

She let go of the hard, wet counter and stepped toward him. She did not try to touch, and he did not flinch away from her. She studied his face. Strong jaw, never a trace of stubble. Thick, straight hair falling over his forehead. Dark eyes. Her mother's nose, straight and fine. She knew that face as well as she knew her own. Better. His face had never changed, never showed a single month or year. When she looked at her own face in the mirror, she was thirty-seven. When she looked at his deep-set eyes and too-long hair, she was twelve. Always twelve.

His hand lifted, pausing in the air not an inch from her cheek. His nails needed cutting.

“You can't touch me,” she said.

“No?” he asked, moving his hand halfway across the inch of air separating them.

She stepped back, pressing herself against the bathroom counter again. The room was small, and she could hear Silas banging around in the kitchen. The toilet was running. Her dead brother was going to touch her face.

“No,” she said, arching backward, her skull tapping against the mirror. Suddenly she could not bear the thought of his hand passing through her. The thought of feeling nothing but air—it made her throat close.

“Look, Rennie,” he said, and he lowered his threatening hand, lowered the fingertips with loops and whorls of fingerprints still on them—should ghosts have fingerprints?—and pointed to the mirror.

Her position was awkward, still leaning backward, cheap laminate edge sticking into the small of her back. She twisted her head and looked at the mirror. She hadn't seen the two of them together since he died. Now she saw herself, shadows under her eyes from too little sleep, hair messy, flustered and even panicked-looking. Beyond her, she saw her seventeen-year-old brother, and she loved him and wanted him to tell her how pretty her voice was, and she wanted him to laugh at her jokes, and she wanted to take his hand in her right hand and take her mother's hand in her left hand, and they would swing her up the stairs like they sometimes did at bedtime.

It was different to want this in her child's thin chest, as she looked at her own face, at the faint lines around her eyes. It was different to think these thoughts and, straightening, look directly into his eyes. She should not be able to do that—the top of her head should just reach the vaccination scar on his shoulder. She looked down, away from him, and saw her toenails, which were painted and should not be. She should have scabs on her knees that were not there.

She saw herself, and she saw him. He was young, and she was not. He should not be here.

“I didn't mean to,” she said.

“I know.”

She could feel the weight of her mistake, hovering nearby, ready to descend. She had done this somehow. She had kept him here, not even out of love but out of need.

“Did you try to leave?” she asked.

He sat on the closed toilet. His knee jangled as he spoke. “All the time.”

“And you couldn't?”

He shook his head.

She wished she was not having this conversation in the bathroom. She leaned against the door, angling herself toward him so that she was not watching herself in the mirror. “Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me it was my fault?”

“It wasn't your fault. You just wanted me back.”

“That was all it took? Me wanting you?”

“Your wanting comes out in unexpected ways.”

This brought out another thought so sudden and clear that she half expected to see it flicker back at her in the mirror. “It wasn't Silas. It was you.”

He didn't answer.

“It's you that I'll lose. That's what they wanted to tell me.” The relief made her laugh. She'd had it all wrong. There was no threat, no warning, no danger. Silas was safe. And her brother was staring at her like she was an idiot. She licked her lips.

“Lynay and Non,” she said. “They told me something.”

He cocked his head.

“Wait,” she said. “Did I bring them here?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Duh,” she said.

He lowered his chin and looked up at her from under his hair. “People don't say that anymore.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Duh,” she repeated. “I'm the one they're showing themselves to.”

“So?”

This was the Scott that she remembered, really. The annoying one. “Did I magic them here just by wanting to see them?”

He rested an arm on the sink. “You think some dead girl has nothing better to do than be your guiding spirit? She's got her own things to deal with.”

He was infuriating. She remembered when she'd asked him what the capital of China was and he said Anchorage and she wrote it down on her homework and then her mother told her never to listen to Scott when he sounded totally sure of himself. He never lacked confidence, even when he should.

“Why can't you ever admit when you don't know something?” she said. “You're not even making sense. You just said that I forced you here. That you didn't want to be here.”